There's been a lot of chatter on the internet recently about Madame Web, the latest critical and commercial flop from everyone's least favourite MCU rip-off, Sony's Spider-Man Universe in which Spider-Man never appears ever not once. We all know the film is bad--bad dialogue, bad editing, bad CGI, bad fight scenes, bad everything. Bad, Madame Web!
However, I want to put aside discussions of studio meddling and poor technical filmmaking for the moment and focus on the on the construction of Cassie Webb's character. It's poorly crafted, obviously, but won't it be fun to talk about why?
Basically, where Cassie begins and where she ends up are only vaguely related to each other, when it should be one of the strongest ties in the movie. Full spoilers, but the final scene--the point of the movie--is that Cassie has essentially adopted three teenage girls whom she has come to love and care for. So, you'd think that her character arc would start at a place where that end point would bring about some kind of catharsis. Maybe Cassie hates kids. Maybe she specifically hates teenage girls, or finds them annoying. Maybe she's scared of responsibility. Maybe the idea of being a maternal figure repulses her because of issues with her own mother.
Aha! That last one doesn't sound too bad, and that's the one the filmmakers made a half-assed attempt to go for. The extent of Cassie's 'mommy issues' shown on-screen in the first act are that a) she's awkward around a kid once and b) she flicks through a pile of documents belonging to her dead mother which we infer make her a bit sad.
Aaaaand that's it. Later, the writers attempts to give Cassie a big emotional moment where she realises that her mother (who was in the Amazon researching spiders when she died) only risked her life in the jungle in order to find a cure for a disease that would kill unborn baby Cassie. But the moment falls so flat because up to this moment we had never seen her overly bothered by her mother's death, or display any hang-ups around feeling abandoned or unloved.
All of this also makes Cassie's decision to help the three girls at all feel so hollow (an evil guy is trying to kill them because he had a vision they would kill him in the future, in case you were curious). Sure, we could say that she saves the girls because she's a good person, but this is a movie. There has be a deeper reason than that, unless her character arc is that she's such a good person she'll risk her life for strangers, like Captain America (it isn't). It makes her decision mean nothing to us, because it essentially means nothing to Cassie. But if they'd made it clear from earlier in the movie how risking her live to save three teenage girls was an emotional gamble of some kind for Cassie, it would've made us feel for the character.
(A small tangent: There should only have been one girl, not three. I can't for the life of me figure out how having her save three girls instead of one benefitted the story. One would've given Cassie more opportunity to bond directly with her, giving more time for a mother/daughter connection to form between the two, instead of having three insanely annoying teenage girls wasting valuable screen time by making horror-movie decisions and having 'banter'. [A tangent to the tangent: don't have someone you want your audience to care about give the middle finger to an ambulance in New York City like a year after 9/11. Not enough character growth in the world could get me past that little character 'quirk'])
While it's obvious that Madame Web was the victim of intense studio fear and abysmal editing, it's also a victim of poor screenwriting. If this was indeed the writers' vision for Cassie's arc before the movie was chopped to pieces and re-edited into the nightmare it is today, then it never stood a chance.
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